Re: Re: ntfs resize and gtk frontends

[Sven Luther]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 08:16:32PM +0100, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Sven Luther wrote:
> > I know nothing about ntfs, but i suppose it is somewhat silly to have to
> > mount the partition while resizing it.
> 
> It's called online resizing. XFS, JFS, reiserfs support online expansion.
> 
> However NTFS resizing is offline and it's indeed unwise to have the
> partition mounted, actually so much that resizing isn't possible if 
> the partition is found to be mounted.
> 
> The source of confusion is the somewhat misnomer naming. Opening a device
> is done in libntfs by ntfs_mount().  In short the device/partition must be
> open/closed three times during shrinkage in some cases.

Ok. I guess there should be no problem with this.

> > > > I am interested by your opinion, what is it in parted that you dislike
> 
> Note, you asked about parted, not libparted so this is why I wrote about
> parted.

My fault, but the main point is adding support for ntfs in libparted.
parted itself knows nothing about filesystems or partition table types.

> > >     Knowing where things are in sector level is very important 
> > >     occasionally.
> > 
> > Notice that this is a critic of the parted program, it doesn't apply to
> > the underlying libparted, which is what matters. 
> 
> Of course, but when you have to investigate user issues you can't say them
> "just hack libparted".

No, but you could provide an enhanced frontend. Maybe already do so,
there are at least three tools in debian-installer, and various
graphical frontends, qtparted among them.

> > Libparted uses geometries which are of the start/end/size kind of
> > information, where all three of those are 64bit integers.
> 
> But this geometry isn't the disk C/H/S geometry however start/end/size are
> in sectors, right?

No, plain sector number in 64 bit integers. Defaults to 512K sectors
though.

> > This is a real problem, but again not one of libparted per see, more one
> > linked to the fact that there is no open CVS or whatever repository.
> > This has to be solved soon, or parted will be forked or something.
> 
> E.g. somebody (you? :) could help out Andrew and if he still won't have
> time then incrementally take over maintainership, or something :)

Yeah, but first the necessary stuff needs to be done to reopen the
savanah CVS. I think Andrew is on this, but due to the savanah
intrusion, new projects and such where postponed to end of january.

> > Just a general impression, and the lack of accessible CVS repository
> > doesn't help. The parted UI often dies for no reason at all, there are
> > some garbage asserts in there which are leftover and makes thing fail
> > horribly in some cases, and so on. I think the main problem is that
> > there is need of more active maintaining and some cleanup of the
> > internal stuff.
> 
> This is my impression also. I would _do_ love to recommend parted to
> people because doing an ntfsresize + Parted's 'resize' looks much easier,
> safer than doing 14 steps with fdisk. But fdisk works (altough that one
> also has its own slight problems :-/).

Yeah.

> > The objection i would have, would be more that you would have to bind in
> > the ocaml runtime and virtual machine, which may be problematic in the
> > small size initrd case of installers, 
> 
> I didn't mention this because I thought it's not true anymore.

Ah, so you are familiar with ocaml, nice.

Friendly,

Sven Luther